The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely sophisticated devices, and computer systems may be found in many different settings. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware, such as semiconductors and circuit boards, and software, also known as computer programs. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer hardware higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One of the most important developments in making computers not only more powerful, but easier to use, was the development of sophisticated user interfaces. Early computer systems were programmed with a series of switches or buttons and provided little relevant feedback during the operation of the computer system. This type of interface proved cumbersome and, accordingly, increasingly more functional and interactive interfaces were developed to extend the functionality of computer systems.
One very popular user interface, that ultimately gained widespread adoption on many different computer systems, was the “command line interface.” Using a command line interface, the user interacted with the computer system by typing a specific command on a keyboard to instruct the computer regarding the desired operation to be performed. The command line interface was not intuitive, however, and still limited the use of computers to those who had the time and desire to learn a large number of relatively cryptic commands.
Recognizing the growing need for a more user-friendly interface, computer engineers and programmers developed the Graphical User Interface (GUI). A GUI uses visual representations of common items to allow a user to operate a computer system. In most GUI-based systems, various icons, symbols, menus, etc. are manipulated or activated by a computer user via a pointing device (e.g., a keyboard, mouse, trackball, touchpad, trackpad, or speech recognition device), which allows the user to give instructions to the computer. The movement of the pointing device is usually translated to the movement of an animated arrow or cursor, displayed on the computer screen. By moving the pointing device, the user can position the cursor at various locations on the computer screen. Then, by activating a button on the pointing device, the user can invoke various commands and options on the graphical user interface.
With the advent of the Internet or World Wide Web, graphical user interfaces have evolved into a style that is often called a web-based interface, where documents are linked together via hypertext. The links may be selected via the aforementioned pointing device, which causes the linked document to be retrieved and displayed. One document may contain multiple links to other documents, which in turn also contain further links, and so on indefinitely. These linked documents may be contained on the same computer or may be widely dispersed on multiple computers connected via a network.
Because a document may contain many links, and because these links may point to chains of linked documents that continue indefinitely, users may experience difficulty in knowing which link to follow. For example, one link may point to a deep chain of linked documents that provides a great deal of information while another link may point to a shallow chain of linked documents that provides comparatively little information. Further, one of the documents may provide the information in which the user is especially interested, such as an error or problem report, but the user does not know which chain to follow in order to find that document. Thus, users may spend valuable time manually following various chains of linked documents in order to find the one document of interest.
Thus, a need exists for an improved technique to show the context of linked documents.